The Cure (29 page)

“We reached a shallow valley where he found an unremarkable tuber, about seven inches long, reddish brown on the outside like a common yam and white on the inside, supporting a broad-leafed vine. Waytee dug a pit and built a fire in it and allowed the fire to burn for several hours. When the lower half of the pit was filled with glowing embers, he put three of the tubers in it and covered them with soil.

“That night we slept near the pit he dug. In the morning, Waytee uncovered the tubers. He handed one to me and made eating motions, so I took a bite.

“The taste surprised me. It was sweet and rich, a lot like chocolate. I never felt anything and had no clue if it really was a cure, but Waytee kept patting me and saying something like, ‘You no drinking hurt,’ in Portuguese. I remember using pantomime and my little bit of Portuguese to ask him if I was cured of drinking. He made me understand the urge was gone. But he warned me very sternly that the ‘drinking hurt’ would come back if I ever drank any more alcohol at all. I remember he said, ‘No more. No little, no big. No. Or you be more drinking hurt.’”

Riley heard the rhythm of The People’s voices in the woman’s quote of Waytee. How he missed their simple way of speaking. So direct. So guileless. He let himself dwell among The People in his memory, hearing lyrical laughter, seeing bars of slanting sunlight slip across the lazy smoke of cooking fires below the verdant canopy as this woman spoke from beyond the grave of Mr. Hanks arriving in a Cessna, and celebrations and mock bidding wars and five thousand dollars, a price it seemed the man had not set just lately, but over seven years ago. He thought of Waytee’s words as the woman in the video described her efforts to conceal the cure for fear that Mr. Hanks would price it out of the reach of people like her brother, and a little girl held captive, a pair of tiny hands bound up in yellow rope. Mr. Hanks, the one he had hoped to pay back with the cure, a wolf among his flock and not a victim after all. And now that Riley knew the right side up truth of things, again he wondered, what did that make him?

He remembered digging the pit in the clearing beside the bodies, Hope using their one and only shovel, him on hands and knees with a metal dinner plate, violently refusing help from everyone else in the search party, both of them beyond all words, beyond humanity itself, and then a glimpse of something moving at the edge of the clearing, a flitting sense of color, and dropping the plate to run toward it, hearing it just beyond that tree, just around those bushes, following for five, ten, fifteen minutes until at last he saw her, the sole survivor of her people, a little girl, bleeding wrists still wrapped up like a gift in yellow rope, Waytee’s grandchild, the last living daughter of those savage murderers—or so he had thought them then—the only innocent, who would become his perfect Bree, standing in a fresh mown field, amidst a halcyon swarm of gnats, or angels.

The frowning judge had turned to look at him. Riley forced himself to listen as the off camera lawyer spoke again. “Mr. Lee Hanks said they would kill the girl? You heard this personally?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do then?”

Riley heard the woman speak of rifles at her back, and white men speared like rodents, and Waytee, giving her the cross that Riley himself had carved for Hope on the occasion of her birthday, the cross Hope gave to Waytee on the day the old man told her he saw Jesus very very much, the cross someone had thrust into his hand in the darkness at Henry’s store, given to him as a payment for the cure. Riley thought of that cross somehow stolen from the old woman by a savage from another tribe in a different jungle, the cross trimmed with golden foil from a box containing chocolates that Hope had given to the murdered children of The People, that cross protecting the old woman, so she said, as every member of his little flock was slaughtered in the clearing, and Riley remembered the flavor of sobriety in the alley by the garbage bin, the surprising chocolate flavor, and he thought about the cross that had traveled this full circle and returned into his hand, the cross that had put him in a cell for murder, just as he had been imprisoned by his conscience all those years for that very crime, a crime of which it now seemed he was innocent, and Riley Keep began to wonder if there might be weights that you must lift and lift and lift again until they crushed you, or until you understood that they were never really there at all.

“Mr. Keep, are you all right?”

He nodded at the judge, saying, “Yes, sir,” forcing himself to stare at the woman on the screen, who said, “For the first few years I moved every three months or so, changing my name and appearance every time. I lived in South America, then Mexico, then Arizona, Texas, Utah, and Nebraska. I spent all my spare time and money on synthesizing the chemicals in the plants. It was really hard under those conditions, but after almost five years, I learned how to do it. I figured out how to make the cure.

“Then I took a chance. I went to see my brother. I knew Mr. Hanks probably had someone watching, but I had to give the cure to my brother. It worked, of course. Everybody knows it works, now. But after a few weeks my brother started drinking again. He didn’t have the urge anymore, but he started drinking anyway. And when he took that first drink the urge returned, just as Waytee said it would. I couldn’t stop it. My brother died six months later.

“That’s when I knew I had to find the last piece of the puzzle, the way to make it really last. So I tracked down the reverend, or at least I got as far as finding his wife and their adopted child. I—”

“Excuse me, but are you talking about Reverend Keep?”

“Oh, sorry. Yes, Reverend Keep.”

“Why him?”

“Waytee told me he had the secret of making the cure last.”

“Are you saying Reverend Keep had part of the formula and you had the other? Because if that’s the case, then we need to rethink this lawsuit.”

“No, I’m not saying that at all. I’ll get to it. I just want to tell this next part first, okay?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, so I moved to the Keeps’ hometown of Dublin, Maine, and changed my name and appearance again, and I waited. See, the reverend had disappeared. Nobody could tell me where he was. I was afraid to show too much interest, because then someone might wonder why I cared. I was afraid of way too many things back then. I was always afraid, always thinking Mr. Hanks would find me. I was even afraid Mr. Hanks had killed the reverend, but Mrs. Keep seemed to think her husband was still alive, so I waited.

“The worst part of that stupid fear was having the secret to the cure and not being able to share it. I knew Mr. Hanks would come for me if I made it public, but I wanted to help as many alcoholics as I could, so I went to work at this little homeless shelter they had in Dublin. It was horrible, getting to know those guys but not being brave enough to give them the cure. I couldn’t stand it after a while, and started healing some of them. I didn’t give it to everyone. That would have attracted too much attention, and besides, I had already seen it was useless for people like my brother. But many of them really seemed to want to stop. I did my best to sort them out from the others and I slipped it into their meals at the shelter. That way they wouldn’t know it was me, or anything else about how it happened. They just realized all of a sudden that they didn’t feel the urge to drink anymore.

“So, anyway, I did that for a year or so without any problems. Then the man who ran the shelter retired, and I took over on my own, and I guess I got impatient. I started curing too many of them. Word got out and more and more homeless alcoholics came. One of them was Reverend Keep.

“Well, I was devastated. I mean, I had no idea he was an alcoholic. I sure didn’t know he was living on the streets. As soon as I saw what he was, it was obvious he didn’t have a clue about the cure, much less any way to make it permanent. So I gave up on that. I decided it was time to figure out a way to get the formula into the hands of the public just the way it was.

The man off-camera said, “You say `get the formula into the hands of the public.’ Does that mean sell it to a pharmaceutical company? Make a lot of money for yourself?”

“Oh, no! I just wanted everyone to have it. Everyone who needs it.”

“Then why not just call a press conference? Make an announcement?”

“I should have. But I was so afraid of Mr. Hanks. It was like a disease, my fear. It clouded my thinking. I thought I had to find a way to get the word out without attracting attention to myself. But everything seemed too risky. I kept thinking of scenarios and then shooting holes in them. I just knew Mr. Hanks would figure out I was behind the cure, no matter how I made it public. I was a witness to what he did, how he ordered his men to murder that whole village. I knew he’d kill me too. So most days I just wanted to keep the cure to myself. But there were other days when I knew I couldn’t keep it secret anymore. I went back and forth like that for a couple of weeks.

“Then a man died in my shelter. He sat down on the floor and drank a bottle of rubbing alcohol and just died, and I knew it was my fault. I killed that man. If only I had enough courage to give the cure to the world back when I first discovered it, he would have lived. I felt sick. I mean I literally threw up, okay? I remember kneeling by the toilet thinking about how afraid I’d been for so long, and realizing my fears were going to kill me too, if I didn’t find some way out from under them. That’s when I knew I had to get the word out, right away.”

The lawyer’s voice asked, “How did you finally do it?”

“Well, I already had a plan, so I just went with it. The part-time pastor of one of the churches that supported the shelter was a pharmacist during the week, so that next Sunday I wrote down the formula for the cure and the instructions for its synthesis. I also wrote a brief explanation of the purpose of it, and Waytee’s warning that anyone who drinks after taking it will get the alcoholic urge again. I put all that in a little envelope and gave it to that pastor’s church anonymously, along with a small sample of the compound. I put it in an offering collection basket in the middle of the Sunday service. That way, I figured there was no way anyone could tie it back to me, and since the minister is a good man and understands the pharmaceutical world, I thought he’d know how to get the cure out to the people.”

The lawyer interrupted again. “Just to be clear, it was your intention to donate the formula for the cure to alcoholism to the First Congregational Church of Dublin, Maine, where the minister is Henry Reardon. Right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. What happened then?”

“I’m not sure. Somehow, Riley Keep ended up with the formula and the sample. He apparently took some himself, and then gave the rest to a few of the men in my shelter.”

“He healed them?”

“The formula did, yes. But there was only enough for about a dozen doses. When Reverend Keep ran out, there was a riot. I thought they were going to kill him. I tried to stop them. They attacked me too, and then they carried him away. I knew the word would spread. I had to disappear or Mr. Hanks would find me. So I did what I always do—I ran away and hid.”

The lawyer off-screen said, “I think we’re almost done, Dr. Williams. There’s just a couple of other things.”

“Okay.”

“Uh, a few minutes ago you said you went to Reverend Keep’s hometown to find a missing ingredient for the cure, a way to make it permanent?”

“That’s right.”

“You still haven’t mentioned what made you think Reverend Keep knew how to do that?”

“Oh, yeah. Okay, well, when I was in the jungle with that Indian, Waytee, before we got back to the village, I asked if there was a way to make the cure last, even if I took another drink, and Waytee said there was. He mentioned Reverend Keep and he used some words I didn’t understand. When he saw I didn’t know what he was talking about, he left me for a minute and went into the jungle. He came back with a short branch from some kind of bush. The branch was covered with thorns. I asked if I was supposed to eat it, but he just frowned and kept pointing to it, saying `Riley.’ I remember he pricked himself with one of the thorns and held his finger up so I could see the blood. I still didn’t understand, but I figured I could get it straightened out back in camp. I started to put the branch in my backpack, but Waytee took it away from me and threw it into the jungle. He seemed really frustrated. I was a little scared, I guess, so I never went to look for it. I sure wish I had. I wish . . .”

Riley was not listening anymore. He was in the jungle with his knife in his hand, working on his translation of the Bible into The People’s language. He had found a prickly vine and cut a section free to carry to the clearing in the village. He had found old Waytee sitting naked on a log, charring wooden spear points in a fire to harden them.

Riley spoke in their language, dangling the vine before him. “Waytee, say how this?”

At first the old man gave him the word for
vine
, but Riley cleared up the confusion and Waytee told him what he needed to know, about the thorns. Then the old Indian said, “Why sound want you?”

“Is in God’s carvings.”

“True? How in?”

“I say story?”

Riley remembered the old man setting his spear aside and composing himself to listen. Riley remembered speaking of a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, sent to torment. He remembered finishing with the words, “when I am weak, then I am strong,” and Waytee taking his spear into his hands again and slowly rotating the tip in the fire’s embers. Riley Keep had said nothing more. He had learned to wait on Waytee, to expect some form of wisdom when the old man shut him out to think like this. It took perhaps ten minutes, and when it came, the Indian spoke it without pausing in his work.

He said, “Is same when I not ghost.”

Riley had often wondered what the old man meant by that. Waytee never did explain. Now, hearing what the Indian said to Willa in the jungle all those years ago, he thought of healing a very small man, Timothy Frank, and that same man dead drunk again, passed out on the concrete.
It ain’t the drinkin’ that’s the problem. It’s the
not
drinkin’.
He thought of Willa—he would always think of her as Willa—and her brother who had been healed, but drank again and died of liquor anyway. He thought of carrying Brice to Dublin, of making millions, giving cars, paying mortgages. He thought of hanging in the background, waiting tables, healing strangers, setting Dylan up to care for Hope and Bree, being very, very strong although his heart was breaking. He thought of Waytee’s finger, bleeding from a thorn, and missionaries murdering and savages who healed. Everything Riley thought he knew was upside down and backward and he himself was inside out. He thought about the weight that never lifted no matter what he did. Sober, drunk, broke or flush, in love or alone, it did not matter. And suddenly he realized what it was he had forgotten in a clearing choked with carnage seven years ago, the reason for his incapacitating weakness. When I am weak, then I am strong.